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Saturday, May 16, 2009

What IF?

As a writer I am equally blessed and cursed with the near constant thought of What If? Mostly for the sake of stories. One important thing I decided upon from near the begining of trying to work towards being published was to keep a notebook for ideas, because new ideas or What If's are always streaming.

I keep spiral notebooks because they open the most easily. I have over a dozen filled with typically one page sections (sometimes more) just on ideas that will evantually be utilized somewhere. Its important to me to always have that to fall back on, because you never know.

My winning first chapter for a recent contest "Dance the Ghost with Me" came from a single late night entry about Porter Rockwell and spirits thick as honey. I took that crude scrawl and hammered it out over two nights, a thursday and friday, spellchecked it saturday afternoon and then sent it out into the ether, just before deadline.

I guessed it would either win or I would be shunned for so brutal and dark a mormon work. Which is still a fine line I worry over. Had I lost, my confidence in ever writing something for the LDS market would have been sorely wounded. Yet even if it had, it was one week later I was offered a contract. So you never know.

3 comments:

What if?? sounds like a good idea. Thank you David for giving me some clues and such to begin my wavering career in writing...Hopefully, once this family trial is done, I will begin to write on my own.

David J. West

David can’t remember a time he wasn’t writing. From
the primordial splash of a drowning
Atlantis to a pair of vigilantes' six-guns blasting raw justice in the
old west. From obsidian tipped arrows raining down on Cumorah’s slopes,
to crusaders'
broadswords sweeping over shadowy terrors, and on to the cold vacuum of
space and the birth of a new star, David is there, recording it all for
your edification and amusement.

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What I'm Reading

The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie This Crooked Way, by James Enge The Arabian Nightmare, by Robert Irwin The Darkeness that Comes Before, by R. Scott Bakker Tides of War, by Steven Pressfield Night of Knives, by Ian C. Esselmont The Pirate King, by R. A. Salvatore Deadhouse Gates, by Steven Erikson El Borak, by Robert E. Howard Swords Aginst Death, by Fritz Leiber Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch Lord of the Silver Bow, by David Gemmell Bloodstone, by Karl Edward Wagner

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“An epic tale of valor and degeneracy where heroes are beset on every side by wicked schemers whose plots, like a flood, threaten to drown them all." (Daron D. Fraley, Author of The Chronicles of Gan: The Thorn)